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MBAs make their way in engineer-crazed tech world
Editor's note: This is the second story in an ongoing series profiling college graduates throughout the United States as they hunt for technology jobs. Check out CNET's special report, "Wanted: A job in tech," for a story tomorrow on a grad student who landed a job at Google, where he'll apply his operations chops to cloud computing.
Julia Davis doesn't quite fit the profile of a typical candidate for a business school degree. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College in hipster mecca Portland, Ore., with a degree in psychology and an art minor, she worked at an art foundry in New York before ultimately finding her way to a consulting firm in San Francisco--and then to Skolkovo, a business school near Moscow in Russia. She finished the 16-month program in December, (most master of business administration, or MBA, programs are two academic years) and has spent the spring on the hunt for a job.
"I wanted to take my career in a more international direction," Davis told CNET. "I looked at the options and one of them was the Skolkovo program, which is co-sponsored by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the U.S., so it has a brand name school associated with it. It was a new program, and it was focused on emerging markets, and the growth story in emerging markets was very compelling."
There's another reason why Davis isn't your typical MBA: She's planning to head to a tech start-up when she graduates. When she spoke to CNET, she said she was in talks with an early-stage start-up in a strategy role. You'll find lots of diverse characters in the tech world, but people straight out of business school with no prior experience in the industry are rare among them.
"I'd always been passionate about technology," Davis said. "I lived in San Francisco, so I was sort of in the thick of it, and then when I moved to Russia I saw not only everything that was happening internationally with technology but also innovation and entrepreneurship, and I just realized that it was an exciting space to be in."… Read more
